The Fourth Plinth event on Sunday was a revival of early 00s SMS media art projects like Speaker's Corner and Helloworld among many others (there was another nice one that Media Lab in Dublin did, and one by Jonah Brucker-Cohen as well not so long ago).
But I'd forgotten how warm and lovely these events can be if you get the right feel. Watching on the web cam, the delight of people in the square on seeing their message held up was clear.
More than any other technology (more so even than pen and paper in my opinion), SMS welcomes people to take part.
If you use text messages you invite everyone in, and don't leave anyone outside.
We've lost that a little bit recently in our understanding of how participation happens.
My favourite message was this one:
"luis miguel, wherever you are, you are always in our hearts..."
Whoever wrote that must have turned up for a tourist afternoon on Trafalgar Square, and was given an unexpected and touching few minutes by being able to send it from the Plinth out to someone, somewhere.
And with the benefit of ten years experience, using a whiteboard was even more sweetly engaging than the architectural of Speakers' Corner or the epic of Helloworld.
We could have done it without even using Thumbprint, but it allowed us to archive the messages and add a cute thing with the reply texts which was nice marketing for the SW11 Literature Festival. That was fair to everyone because it was Lorinda from the festival up there on the Plinth!
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